An authority on the flora of the Mediterranean and chief editor of the Flora of Turkey and the Aegean Islands, Peter Davis was a renowned taxonomist based at the University of Edinburgh.
Davis was born in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, and began his working life in 1937 as an apprentice to an alpine plant nursery in Sussex. He made his first plant collecting expedition to Turkey in 1938. He was subsequently posted to the eastern Mediterranean and Cairo during the Second World War, where he spent his free time building up an extensive knowledge of the regional flora.
Following the war, Davis embarked on a degree in botany at the University of Edinburgh, during which period he worked on his Mediterranean collections with fellow undergraduate Vernon Heywood. The pair made an expedition together to Spain in 1948, sponsored by the Royal Horticultural Society, and another, to Turkey, in 1950.
Davis remained based in Edinburgh for the rest of his career, where he was appointed Lecturer in 1950 and Professor of Taxonomic Botany in 1979. From 1959 onwards his main preoccupation was the Flora of Turkey and the East Aegean Islands, published between 1965 and 1988. This entailed much fieldwork in Turkey, where he mounted eleven expeditions between 1938 and 1966.
Davis' fieldwork extended to other countries on the Mediterranean coastline and his PhD was awarded in 1952 for work on the taxonomy of Middle Eastern flora. His work in Morocco, meanwhile, contributed to the Flora of Morocco project. In 1958 he was awarded the Cuthbert Peek Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his exploration of Kurdistan.
Davis made his last visit to Turkey in 1982. His collections from the country number c.28,500 specimens. The Turkish government recognised his outstanding work with a Certificate of Merit. He also received the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society and the Neill Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to both of which he was elected Fellow.
In addition to his floristic work, Davis was a highly respected teacher at Edinburgh and author of Principles of Angiosperm Taxonomy (1991) and The Identification of Flowering Plant Families (1989, with J. Cullen).
Sources:
A. Baytop, 2010, "Plant collectors in Anatolia (Turkey)", Phytologia Balcanica, 16(2): 205-206
P.H. Davis, 1969, "Turkish itineraries. IV.", Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 29: 203-209
P.H. Davis, 1976, "North African and other itineraries 1961-1975", Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 35: 121-130
V.H. Heywood, 1994, "Obituary: Peter Hadland Davis (1918-1992)", Watsonia, 20: 67-180
S.L. Jury, 2004, "Herbarium RNG Collector Database: Davis, Peter Hadland":
www.herbarium.reading.ac.uk/modules.php?name=Collectors&rop=show_collector&id=3, accessed 5 September 2012
K. Tan and P. Smith, 1992, "Professor Peter Hadland Davis (18 June 1918 - 5 March 1992): a memoir", Flora Mediterranea, 2: 9-14.
